Open Book: Above All Things, by Tanis Rideout

In 1924, at a Tibetan monastery called Rongbuk, a Tibetan Sherpa is anxious to dissuade the Englishman George Mallory from making a last desperate effort to reach the summit of Mount Everest. There are demons that inhabit these heights, and the goddess of the mountain, the Sherpa warns, is against them.

With due respect to the goddess, she may not be the worst obstacle the Englishman and his party face in their quest to scale the mountain. Some of their attitudes — notably a doubt among certain members of the party whether it is quite sporting to use new-fangled oxygen masks — pose more of a hazard.

This is a fascinating, true story and Canadian Tanis Rideout has done justice to its harrowing quality in her debut novel, Above All Things. The narrative is complex but effective in its structure — chapters describing the 1924 expedition in the third person, mostly but not entirely from the point of view of George, alternate with chapters in which his wife, Ruth, speaks in the first person, conveying her dread of the expedition’s outcome. The Ruth chapters take place during the span of one day of her life during George’s absence, and they form a resonant parallel with the longer span and more epic struggle of the George chapters.

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In the Ruth chapters, we also hear what might be called the official version of the expedition. Ruth, torn inwardly by anger, guilt, fear and longing, is confronted by well-wishers who view the expedition as a great spiritual and national event. Ruth knows her husband is not indifferent to the promise of national and personal glory, but she suspects he also has a need to roam far from the bonds of wife and children. Mountain climbing offers just such an escape.

This is lost, however, on the organizer of the expedition, one Arthur Hinks, who blathers on about Mount Everest being “the third Pole.” The Americans and Norwegians beat the English to the first two, so Great Britain needs the third. “We must all rally to do our bit,” Hinks tells Ruth.

Unspoken is the feeling that Britain needs an unalloyed triumph, such as the conquest of Mount Everest, to offset the terrible waste and futility of the recent war. George in particular feels survivor guilt — while he spent only a brief stint in the trenches, his brother died in them. In George’s case, this guilt is augmented by his failure to prevent, in an expedition two years ago, the deaths of seven Sherpas in an avalanche. The press, George believes, blamed him for this tragedy. Nor does it help that his father, a stern reverend, believes this whole business of mountain climbing is sheer self-indulgence.

Indeed, why must one climb the third pole? It is a good question. George’s famous quip to a gaggle of American reporters — “Because it is there” — will not do. Nor will the obvious rewards of a successful climb — lasting fame, money, job offers and so on — sufficiently answer the question. As the climbers near the peak, and the real possibility of success or failure looms, the question becomes ever more urgent. George feels he must make it. “Ruth had lived for the past five years on the promise that he would reach the summit and then everything would change for them,” George reflects. “Disappointing her would break his heart. And Everest would still be there, between them. The great mass of it and the years it had consumed. For nothing. Only claiming the summit could make things right between them.”

Abandonment of the quest would be infamy. “Deserting Everest would follow him everywhere,” he thinks. “He would be crucified, the failure pinned to him, attached to his name once again.”

Entangled with these reflections are more philosophical matters. George has encountered the Bloomsbury menace at Cambridge, meeting aesthetes and intellectuals such as James and Lytton Strachey. They are the apostles of self-awareness in the pursuit of pleasure and experience, and they have a hand in George’s mental turmoil. “Everest is proof enough against God,” George proclaims.

The great power of the novel, understandably, is not these internal debates but Rideout’s description of the battle between the vulnerable bodies of the climbers and the invulnerable mountain. In describing this battle, Rideout’s prose is almost lyrical. Referring to an expedition member named Sandy, the author writes, “The cold and dryness were taking their toll on everything. Sandy’s own face was dry and scabbed and hurt constantly, as if the skin was being flayed from his skull.” The dry air leeches all moisture from breath and body; winds suffocate and the sun, far from bringing relief from the cold, is “merciless, scorching the atmosphere too thin to provide any protection.”

It is the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere at that height that is most dangerous, however. In oxygen deprivation, George tells a novice climber, “There’s just no way to tell how you will respond.” The symptoms might begin with increased irritability and squabbling among team members, and move on to a state of semi-drunkenness, to headaches and nausea, exhaustion, stupor, outright hallucinations and pain that penetrates to the marrow of one’s bones.

Underlining this are certain verbal techniques of the author. Rideout likes to contrast the relative lack of colour in the high Himalayas — the whites, the greys, the blues — with Ruth’s painterly use of vibrant colours and especially green in her artwork. Rideout continually describes people and objects as “shadows” and “silhouettes,” reinforcing an atmosphere of the phantasmal, on and off the mountain.

Of great effectiveness are individual scenes, as well — the expedition’s discovery of the detritus of their previous expedition, including their own frozen excrement and urine from a couple years ago. At one point, they run across the frozen corpse of a solitary climber named Wilson, who perished a few years previous. “Wilson’s eyes were open, milky, and iced-over,” Rideout writes.

History tells us, of course, that George Mallory did not succeed, but this foreknowledge does not diminish the suspense of Rideout’s narrative. It will be a stony-hearted reader who does not hope against hope that George makes the summit and returns alive. This is so despite George’s relatively unsympathetic persona, a persona that quite overshadows that of his wife. Ruth is wan in comparison to George. For the purposes of the novel, it could hardly be otherwise — she is bound, in some sense, to highlight the difference between what Rideout calls “female duty” and “male duty.” Ruth
reflects, “Duty is something that men step inside and fasten around them, like uniforms. For women, duty is a cloak draped over us, that weighs us down.” No wonder she tells a friend, “Some days it all feels too much. As though we’re ghosts and we’re waiting for life to begin.”

The novel leaves us with a question. It may not be the key question of the novel, but it is an important one. Does the virtuous patience and stoicism of women such as Ruth help make possible the useless male spectacles of carnage (the war) and extreme physical endurance (climbing Mount Everest)? That some women — as recent tragedies among Mount Everest climbers have shown — are now assuming more and more the mantle of male duty in no way diminishes the urgency of that question, so vividly raised by Rideout’s novel.